Over the past decade, I’ve heard an ever-expanding glossary of how money meets the impact/development world. Strategic. Trust-based. Systems change. Participatory. Field-building. Community-led. Log-frame loyalists. I’ve likely used all of them at some point, maybe even in the same sentence, and likely nodding earnestly.
Each of these models has its logic that reflects a range of instincts. Leverage to letting go. Build infrastructure to fund organisers. Cheques with conditions, others with disclaimers.
Since it is Monday, I want to offer my own term to the canon.
What would a kind of philanthropy that didn’t begin with a plan, a grant cycle, or even a theory of change look like? What if it started with the radical premise that “we don’t understand enough”? And showed up with attention, not answers?
That didn’t act quickly, but stays long enough to notice what’s actually going on. Not in the abstract, but in the way people negotiate power, systems, belonging, and daily survival? That instead of measuring, scaling, or replicating, it observed, reflected, and, when invited, accompanied?
What would philanthropy look like if it borrowed less from management consulting and more from anthropology?
Not the colonial or extractive kind. The kind that does fieldwork. That sits at the back, takes notes, stirs the rice, asks too many questions, and updates its priors based on what it hears.
Would we call it philanthropology?
Where culture, not capital, is the deeper operating system?
It wouldn’t move fast. It wouldn’t promise scale. It is unlikely to survive a review meeting.
It would also make us … philanthropologists.
Originally written for LinkedIn on 30 June 2025. View original →
Gautam John 
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